The Day the Algorithm Died

Peter Prestipino

Posted on 12.12.2007

As maligned as much as it is ballyhooed, human-powered search engine Mahalo
announced an interesting new feature in "Mahalo Social". The feature allows
users to collaborate in building trusted search results with their friends. By
participating in the Mahalo community (recommending links, sharing links
you've recommended) your rank will increase on the Mahalo leader board, providing you an opportunity to increase your exposure.

"We believe the next phase of development in the search space is going to
be based on human curation," said Mahalo CEO Jason McCabe Calacanis. He added:
"Human curation via a social network is a very effective solution for evolving
machine search results."

Mahalo also announced that it will be making its entire index available in
both RSS and OPML formats under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial
license, which means results can be used in a non-commercial setting without
having to ask permission.